Arkansas Law Review Volume 73 Number 2 Article 1 August 2020 New Things Under the Sun: How the CFTC is Using Virtual Currencies to Expand Its Jurisdiction James Michael Blakemore University of Michigan Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/alr Part of the Banking and Finance Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Secured Transactions Commons, and the Securities Law Commons Recommended Citation James M. Blakemore, New Things Under the Sun: How the CFTC is Using Virtual Currencies to Expand Its Jurisdiction, 73 Ark. L. Rev. 205 (2020). Available at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/alr/vol73/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arkansas Law Review by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. NEW THINGS UNDER THE SUN: HOW THE CFTC IS USING VIRTUAL CURRENCIES TO EXPAND ITS JURISDICTION James Michael Blakemore* INTRODUCTION A decade has passed since Bitcoin solved a fundamental problem plaguing virtual currencies:1 How to ensure, without re- sort to financial intermediaries or other trusted central authorities, that a unit of digital currency can be spent only once.2 In that * Partner at Ketsal PLLC. Adjunct Professor, University of Michigan Law School. For thoughtful comments and conversations, I would like to thank Connie Chang, Joshua Garcia, Zachary Fallon, Diego Zambrano, Pandora Chang, participants in the Arkansas Law Review Symposium on the Evolving Regulation of Crypto, and the editors of the Arkansas Law Re- view. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ketsal.